Amazing Notepad Trick To Create Hidden Text Files Without Using Any Third Party Software

Today I will be sharing a pretty unknown trick to create hidden text files using nothing but Notepad, you can use this simple trick to hide plain text data without using any third-party utility or simply use it to impress your friends showing your geekness, the text files created using the method below won't show anywhere in DOS or Windows irrespective of the hidden and system display file-settings, the files created using this can only be accessed if you know the correct file-name used while creating the file.

Now type in notepad VisibleFile.txt:HiddenFile.txt and hit Enter, you can change VisibleFile.txt and HiddenFile.txt to names of your choice (notice the : between both file-names), You will be prompted to Create a New file click Yes as shown below.

Now enter data you want to hide, save the file and close notepad.

Visit the file-save location, you will see your VisibleFile.txt file (non-hidden) there, you can open the file and enter any text of your choice as any other normal text file.

The hidden file HiddenFile.txt will not be visible under Windows Explorer or DOS.

To open and read/write your hidden file, type in the command notepad VisibleFile.txt:HiddenFile.txt (change filenames with your own used during Step 3 above) at DOS command prompt and hit Enter.

Do note that if the visible file (VisibleFile.txt) is deleted your hidden file (HiddenFile.txt) will also get deleted.

This little "trick" requires NTFS. It's a feature in NTFS that was designed primarily for compatibility with other operating systems, such as Apple's HFS.

In NTFS it's called Alternate Data Streams. Other operating systems refer to these as resource forks. It's a method for storing additional information about a file system object. For instance, a file's icon or thumbnail could be stored in the resource fork, or as they mention in the Wikipedia article below, you could break a document into the actual text data and the data about how to present the text such as formatting and alignment.

Well, I can only commend the effort involved in not just finding out about using NTFS streams but implimenting them into something usable. Yes, you can download a tool from sysinternals and yes, you need an NTFS partition for it to work but.....

If the internet has now turned into such a sad place where people can only comment on inadequacies instead of complimenting efforts then I think we should all go back to using 56k modems as the bandwidth is quite litterally wasted !

It does make me wonder why the negative minds don't start populating the net with useful stuff .... i.e. not critisizms :)

Nice one Admin. I will commend your efforts even if a percentage of the above can only critisize !

Keep up the good work and disregard those geeks with too much time on there hands !

Hmm…it’s quite tricky… Although I’m not sure whether it’s going to properly or not. I have tried this method and I successfully hide my file. My friends were quite impressed to see my work. But unfortunately I couldn’t retrieve the text file. Now my friends are making fun of me and telling that I’ve lost my magical power!

Kindly tell me how we add number for example 250 before large file containing numbers for e.g. 5680000,5680001,5680002etc....I need just to put 250 before these numbers and I have 300,000 numbers .Please help .Thk u

I like it for what it's worth. A potential shortcoming is when you try to copy the text file to a thumbdrive, for example. Windows gives you a warning that the extra info may be lost if copying continues, and it reveals the name of the hidden file:

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